Suicide is the extreme tip of the iceberg, and thankfully still rare. But the rest of the iceberg, comprising teens suffering mental health and body image issues - not to the point of suicide, but still serious - is staggering. Teens are self-medicating and sorting themselves into echo chambers that reinforce their negative feelings, entering an illness-to-identity pipeline, where they cannot see any other way of being. Doctors are completely unequipped to deal with this. Parents are powerless.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I believe the constant focus on what we call mental health and body image issues is making the problem worse. I know those words are supposed to alleviate stigma and normalize, but if you're telling kids going through regular adolescent issues that they have mental health or body image issues, you're not helping them. And naval gazing is going to make things worse.
Maybe I'm a product of the 90s, but every issue me and my peers faced was waved off as teenage angst that I'll grow out of. I didn't have "anxiety", I was being a wuss. And they were right.
If someone told me I had mental health issues and made me focus and resolve those, through therapy or meds, I would have been much worse off. Brushing it off leaves some small percentage of teens worse off, but I would think the overwhelming majority would be better off not focusing on it. This doesn't even include things like "generational trauma" that people dump on kids.
Whatever you think about today's society, I think it's safe to say that across the board we have a lot more inward facing reflection on things like mental health, especially for children. And what do we have to show for it? Are they better off? Across the board, even kids who aren't as connected to social media are worse off. Which tells me this focus is net negative
To me at 51, looking back at my own experiences, I think the things we tell ourselves work in a similar fashion to software; programming our identity.
The first "programmers" are our parents. Classic negative tropes like a parent saying "you'll never amount to anything" run in a loop in our brains for many years until finally that program expires (typically around mid life). In turn a negative identity will effect you in all areas of life, from how you interact with people to even your physical posture.
Perhaps the lowest level of "programming" you can do to yourself is the mantra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra - you could see this like assembly language, and humanity has known about this for a very long time.
So yes, giving teenagers labels which they identify with and repeat to their friends has a reinforcing aspect to it. And social media has played a very significant role in providing those labels.
To me an interesting thing about TikTok in particular, compared to Instagram, is I think TikTok users are more concerned with the question "who am I?" vs Instagram which is more about "this is me" (telling the world who you are). That's what's made TikTok more popular as, especially when you're young, trying to figure yourself out is a major pre-occupation.
I think it is a tough balancing act.
I am a product of the 90s also. I was severely depressed all through high school and probably could have been helped in some way.
Instead I got nothing. Just suffered in silence and I didn't even know I was depressed. Any statistics from the 90s on mental health I wouldn't be counted in other than being a mentally healthy, happy, normal kid even though nothing could be further from reality.
What would be the alternative if you were suffering the same fate today? So you think you would have been better off medicated? Or some kind of therapy?
Despite claiming the opposite, teenagers are sponges for whatever floats in society around them. When most of the highly valued voices in society tell them that they should be sad and anxious and traumatized, is it really surprising that it's exactly what they turn out to be?
There's a reason the amount of self-described gay and lesbians has dropped massively in regions where it is no longer transgressive at all (but being trans is, so there's a massive increase there). It could be that homosexuality was actually just a mask for a trans identity, but that's odd because it would invalidate virtually everything that has been said in defense of tolerance of gays and lesbians.
Similarly, all this "mental health awareness" has done anything but normalize mental health issues. I'm sure this is well-intentioned however intentions don't count for much. The normalization of "minor" mental health issues has led to a situation where many more people start treatment with heavy side-effects to address issues that are often less serious than the side-effects of the treatment.
Worse, and here I'm thinking mostly about ADHD, what has been normalized is not the fact that some people have less attention than others. What has been normalized is to diagnose kids with ADHD and start medicating them. We have done the opposite of normalization here: it used to be that people with rowdy behavior were just expected to naturally grow out of it. That their education would take a little bit more time. They weren't considered broken or lesser or, crucially, abnormal or sick. In effect, we have turned slight deviations from the norm in terms of this one personality trait into a disease that must be treated. And because I can already read the comments: yes, some people legitimately have ADHD to such a degree that it interferes with their life and it makes sense to medicate. However, basically nobody starts taking ADHD medicine when they're already an adult, the decision is always made for them. And few parents, doctors and teachers will advise _against_ making an annoying child more docile unless they're acutely aware of the risks. And this tendency is further reinforced because the entire school system is run by people who have no idea what being a 4-to-18 years old boy is like and don't want to know.
When I was a teacher, I noticed this too: the more we talked about mental health, the more cases of anxiety our school counsellors saw. Perhaps some of that was simply awareness. But adolescence is also a time of experimentation with one's identity, and I fear we've allowed 'anxiety' to become an identity we offer to them to try on for size.
I think we overshot from „mental illness ignored or undetected in childhood last until adulthood and a lot of suffering could have been prevented if treated in childhood“ to what you describe. The intentions are good but I think nobody could have expected that this turns teenagers into mental illness collectors.
The answer seems to be yes, all the way through to a dose-dependent response [1].
I'm cautious to label people as evil. But Adam Mosseri working to addict younger and younger children to the dopamine hit of ad-driven social media challenges me on that restraint.
I always say: the most qualified people in the world are currently trying to get one more second or one more interaction out of you
> most qualified people
Most qualified of the antisocial people
Well if you're giving sources it would be interesting to see the source on Adam Mosseri.
C-level execs of SM companies heavily limit access to these services for their own children. They know much better than the general public knows by publicly available research.
To them it's a cash cow, and who has the minds of the kids has the future. TikTok ans SnapChat specifically entered the market by attracting attention of ever younger users.
> execs of SM companies heavily limit access to these services for their own children.
Well, any responsible parent should do that actually...
Parent trying to limit addiction vs. addiction-focused megacorp, and the irresponsible one is the parent who inevitably loses?
Sure. But not every parent is that responsible. The SM companies are very big and rely on ads to fill their pockets.
I really believe we need govt to step in to protect children. For example: make it forbidden to show ads to youngsters. That will take some incentive away.
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I seem to vaguely remember from literature history in high school that during - I wanna say - the romance, there were some poems and novels that also sparked a suicide epidemic.
Yes, there was a spike in suicides after Goethe published his first novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther).
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/04/22/the-werther-effect...
It seems likely to me social media would play a role in this, but I'm going to push back a little because I'm also aware that social media has basically become the catch all when trying to explain any and complex social problem in the modern era.
I think we should remember that social media is basically used across the world today, but the rise in teen suicide seems to be particularly pronounced in the West – and rates of depression even more so.
I’m personally concerned with the number teens on depression medication today and how readily depression is diagnosed. I grew up before social media but I was a pretty depressed teen. I hung around with other fairly depressed teen. The depressed angsty teen thing has existed for a long time. It does seem to just be part of growing up for many. However when I was younger I didn’t know anyone on anti-depressants. If I grew up today it’s likely my whole friendship group would have been on them, including myself. And given this change in the rate of anti-depressant use, I’m fairly concerned we don’t yet fully understand how these medications affect younger people and might be contributing to suicide rates.
This quite controversial because people feel like I’m attacking medication many find useful, but I’ve personally seen myself how anti-depressants can make people feel more at ease with self harm and suicide. These medications don’t seem to necessarily make people happier, but more comfortable, and they seem to be good at numbing what used be a painful emotional experience allowing people to get on with their lives easier. Not always of course, and it depends on the medication, but this does seem to be true in a lot of cases.
I became concerned about this when kid in my family took anti-depressants at the age of 9 and shortly after started to self-harm and become increasingly violent. He was definitely less sad, but he was far more comfortable with hurting people and himself. When I spoke to him about what he was doing he seemed to struggle to even understand how much he was hurting people, and this was hard to understand given how sweet and caring he used to be.
I might be wrong, but I wish we were more focused on understanding whether the over diagnosis and medicalisation of depression in young people is fuelling suicide rates and mental illness, but I’m aware this is a very unpopular view since some people feel I’m attacking depressed people who feel the medication is helping. I’m not, but I do think we need to do more research to understand how these drugs can affect young people with developing brains and emotions. It seems to me it’s probably reasonable to assume artificially altering the brain chemistry of children with medication would have some consequences on their mental stability, and there is clinical evidence that some anti-depressants are linked to increased suicide rates and other metal illnesses, but I’m still not sure we have good long-term studies about how giving children these medications to children alters their development over time and might make them more likely to commit suicide in their early adulthood or late teenage years.
Hope this comment is received in good faith.
The timing sure is suspicious
Ever read, 'Lord of the flies', written ages ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies Now with social media we have all manner of bullying, both from the local peer group as well as any good/bad/perverted person who can type, ' yes, I am a 13 year old girl, just like you' Those who weather this are scarred by it, but those who do not are often crushed by it, badly scarred, even prompted to death. It would be good if a 'class face book', so 25 class mates are the only ones on that loop, and some peer moderation was created for safety and they all had their own true names. Age? after 16/17/18 you can reach a level of hardness that you can 'cross the street'
Counterpoint: How much of these novels are imaginative paranoia driven by cynical consumers? The closest similar incident - the Tongan castaways (granted they were aged 13 - 19 instead of 6 - 12) had the boys create a more or less exemplary society. They worked in teams, hunted and fish, created instruments to sing songs - no where even close to what happened in the novel.
Having been on the receiving end of actual real-life bullying from 90% of my peers (the other 10% being bystanders) through high school because I was younger (among other things), I can tell you that Lord of the Flies is in some ways depicting the kids as less cruel than real kids are.
For others who hadn't heard of the Tongan Castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways - I need to find 10 mins today to watch the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO_RlJxnVI
The novel was a dark satire of other contemporary novels.
In those, "civilized" white kids basically brought modernity to the natives after getting shipwrecked in what was essentially colonialist propaganda.
So it's a bit like The Boys surviving in history and Marvel being lost from memory and people thinking that superheroes are violent psychopaths.
I hadn't heard that explanation for the novel before, but it makes me think of how Blazing Saddles has already become a bit de-contextualized from what preceded it: A constant TV. show storm--possibly worse than superhero movies today--depicting the "Wild West" as a wholesome and family-friendly place where society was kinda-great for everyone. (Largely due to the television industry regulations and internal standards.)
The movie, in contrast, showed an imperfect Wild West where there was injustice, government corruption, blatant racism, vice, all-round stupidity, etc. It wasn't just transgressive shock value for its own sake.
And now nobody cares anymore about the context. Today colonisation is alive and well by those exclaiming to be humiliated and colonized in the past. skin color is out of the picture, its just power asymmetry due to history and tech. So all that remains is a parabel about societal decay.
A thought this has always bothered me: people tell you to read fiction to "learn about the human condition". But, well, it's fiction - people make it up, and (2) whatever insights you imagine might be gleaned are tempered through a very specific lens: that of fiction authors.
It's hardly a representative cross-section of society.
Tongan castaways numbered only six boys. I think social dynamics get very interesting in larger numbers and with mixed genders.
For consideration, look at the utopian rat experiments.[1] As resources become scarce and competition increase - the likelihood that a social structure will collapse increases. While humans are not rats, this has been seen over and over again in primate colonies. There are parallels in modern day ghettos around the world.
This has implications for social media; as the number of people coming into contact with each other increase -- the more polarized we become online.
Humans do great in groups until they get bigger than the size of a larger hunter-gatherer tribe, say more than a few dozen individuals. Basically, the point at which it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone else, and you need to replace informal, personal organisation with formalised and impersonal structures.
Humans are not rats, but nor do we really behave like other primates. We have evolved to co-operate socially and we do it very, very well, including (and perhaps especially) in resource-constrained environments. And we even engage in self-domestication to weed out individuals who attempt to dominate or cheat in such situations.
But the problem with modern society is it throws all of that evolved ability out of the window. We are attempting to learn how to co-exist and thrive while living in cities of millions of strangers, while living lifestyles their bear no relation at all to traditional human life. In a way, it's a miracle that we do as well as we do.
That book is a fiction. We really really should stop using events in a work of fiction as arguments about real world.
“Where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!” - Captain Beatty (Fahrenheit 451)
Sometimes I too find the allure in this line of thinking, yet it seems dangerous somehow.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss such comparisons. Fiction can be a great tool to explore very real truths.
Have you read 1984? It's quite useful for discussing the state of the real world.
I'd also recommend Fahrenheit 451, it seems more in tune with the current social media and entertainment landscape.
"Brave New World" is what happened, while we all feared "1984".
The parallels between real life and Brave New World are positively uncanny.
Even the demographic dynamics of the real world suggest that we're on the path to a state-driven reproductive system.
Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes.
It's interesting to see people deny this over and over, as they bask in the cold glow of their phone's screens.
It's interesting to see people who are supposed to be intellectually biased, worldly and skeptical fall for propaganda and moral panic simply because their hatred of the modern web and popular culture blinds them to what should be obvious attempts to manipulate them as a pretext to regulate and control free speech and expression.
Whenever you're presented with a narrative of breathless hyperbole and fear about "the children" you should at least question the motives behind it, especially when the implied response is "the government needs to do something." To me this sounds little different than the satanic panic or child sex cult fears of the 1980s. Did such things exist? Sure. Was there a satanic child molester hiding behind every bush? No. The whole thing was a fear-driven campaign purposely blown out of proportion in order to justify increased authoritarianism by the justice system and to demonize and harass the gay population. And of course the entire thesis of the article is that Section 230 is harmful and social media should be regulated by the government "for the children."
Bad Thing(tm) is corrupting the morals of the youth and driving them to depression and suicide and something must be done. Where have we heard this before?
Are there people so addicted to and emotionally harmed by social media that it drives them to suicide? Probably. Can social media have negative effects on mental health? Sure. Is it leading to a "teen suicide crisis?" No, that's an obviously emotionally-driven phrase intended to frighten and manipulate people. Is the answer to have the government use its monopoly on violence to regulate speech on the web? Absolutely not.
What does fearmongering have to do with it?
If we go by fearmongering, then the government and society at large would push to put a phone on each and every child starting from birth.
Your reply conveniently ignores the sharp uptick in suicidal ideation and attempts among teenagers, especially among ages 12-16… with girls the hardest hit.
Expectations for children are now to always be on-call to their peers 24/7 and for parents to always reach them every second of the day with gps tracking to boot.
Social media companies like meta have already been whistleblown as spending an insane amount of time and money using psychology to engineer their applications to be as addicting as possible.
Adults can barely restrain themselves, so why do we expect children to pass unharmed?!
You can sit behind your buzzwords and intellectual wrangling, but there is no denying that social media has a massive negative impact on children and there are ramifications that reach far later in life.
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When I was in college, we studied and analyzed the case of Megan Meier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier
It was tragic how she was bullied and felt compelled to suicide in a method that's often invisible to parents and other responsible adults. Even more appalling, in Megan's case, is that a supposedly responsible mother posed as an underage boy in order to bully her, and wound up in federal court on CFAA charges!
But honestly, it's even more tragic that she was so doped-up on so many psychotropic drugs. A key feature of these drugs is to limit aggression, resistance and rebellion in the patient. If it weren't for the excessive drugs, Megan may have ironically enjoyed fewer ideations and compulsions, and reduced compliance and submission to the will of others...
Social media is ironically socially-isolating, and fosters outrage and fear, rather than communion and trust. It's inherently seductive, and detrimental to anyone's mental health. Teens have no business using it, especially any teen who could be at-risk of exploitation, bullying, or violence.
My goodness, what a sad story.
How disgustingly pathetic that a grown woman felt the need to harass a 13 year old.
Social media promotes immature behavior, over and over again.
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No.
In terms of pure Maslow, the tendency of modernity to destroy the transcendency of life, leaving the moral vacuum we see, is the central issue.
Settle down; marry; enjoy parenthood; participate in a community of faith; ignore the haters and their ersatz noise.
Is there a law yet, such as "The more comments you read, the probability of mistaking a comment for AI-generated content approaches 1" or something?
What's a community of faith?
This comment reeks of right-wing pseudo-intellectualism, from the likes of Jordan Peterson.
Marriage, religion and parenthood are not answers to teenagers social media addiction.
What “moral vacuum” are you talking about? You sure you’re not upset by unfettered capitalism instead?